Fourth Down to Death

by Brett Halliday

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I wouldn’t recognize my friendly neighborhood bookmaker if I saw him.” He drew on a pair of tapered checked slacks. “It’s a rare Monday morning when the published point spread comes close to reflecting the true situation on the club. But what can you do? Nothing—the risks are out of proportion. My way of dealing with the problem is not to read the sports section. I know the name of the team we play tomorrow, but that’s truly the extent of it. I don’t think Reddick could bring himself to believe this, but it’s literally true.”

  “Do you know Ted Knapp, Doctor?”

  “Certainly,” Bishop said, looking around. “Football insurance is fantastically complicated. He and I have endless wrangles. You’re probably referring to the fact that, unlike me, Ted Knapp is known to be a gambler. And I’m sure he wins an occasional bet with information he has picked up from me. He sent me an expensive stereo system for my birthday, ostensibly because I’ve been so helpful in insurance matters. I talked to Mr. Zacharias, and we decided I should send it back. Reddick had also heard about that stereo system—a ridiculous man.”

  “Then you haven’t had any cash dealings with Knapp?”

  The doctor gave Shayne an irritated look. “I’m not out of my mind.”

  “Would you like to deny that you’ve had anything to do with betting on football games, or with transmitting information to people who used it for betting purposes?”

  “I deny it flatly. Am I under suspicion here, Shayne?”

  “Sure. You’re in a key position. That stereo system you sent back would be a good way to cover yourself, to show you’re a hard man to buy. What do you know about Ronnie’s injury last Sunday?”

  “Not a blessed thing. I didn’t examine him, and I can substantiate that. The whole episode has been very, shall we say, unusual. At approximately eleven thirty tonight he discharged himself as cured. That’s not only unusual, it’s highly suspicious. The story is that certain intimates of his knew about it in advance, and plunged heavily on Miami.”

  “Who told you that, Doctor?”

  “People have been calling me. I’m the one who’s supposed to know whether our first-stringers are healthy enough to play. I’ve been kept completely in the dark on Ronnie. I don’t think even Morty Lynch knows about it yet. We’ve all been assuming all week that we’ll have to go against New York with the standby quarterback, and if this turns out to be one of Ronnie’s typical escapades, I can predict an explosion. The fur,” he said with some relish, “will definitely fly.”

  “Have you ever heard of Ronnie having money on a game?”

  Bishop sat down and slipped his narrow feet into highly polished ankle-high boots. “There are always rumors.”

  “Did Reddick ask you about any rumor in particular?”

  “Shayne,” Bishop said, exasperated, “Reddick was fishing, just as you are. I had to cut him short because I had other things to do, patients to attend to. I wasn’t sure of his position. I had the impression he was thinking first of Stitch Reddick, second of Stitch Reddick, and only third of professional football. I realize that it’s different with you. You’ve been brought in by the front office, and if there’s any hanky-panky going on, you sincerely want to stop it… Hanky-panky—a glib expression.… I know this is serious. But it’s been a long day, and tomorrow will be even longer. If you have any more specific questions, I’ll be happy to try to answer them.”

  “How old are you, Doctor?”

  Bishop’s hand jerked slightly. “That’s specific, at least. I’m forty-two.”

  “How long have you been wearing that kind of boots?” The doctor turned slowly, and for the first time his eyes stayed on Shayne’s face for more than an instant before jumping away. “I completely miss the point.”

  “How well do you know Dody Germaine?”

  Bishop’s manner was beginning to become more agitated. He reached for a lightweight sports jacket—this, too, was new—but sat down again without putting it on.

  “I think that qualifies as being no particular business of yours.”

  “It’s everybody’s business,” Shayne told him. “If Reddick didn’t question you about it, it was because he hadn’t stumbled across it yet. I don’t know Mrs. Bishop, but the chances are that she and Dody aren’t in the same class. That’s a stylish-looking young girl. She made big money as a model a few years ago. You get used to that kind of income, and you miss it when it stops. I can’t tell you much about her friends, but I know the name of one of them. It’s Lou Mangione. He’s a button man. Very slick, but small-time. He carries a gun. Does that fit with the Dody you know?”

  “Not at all,” Bishop said, frowning.

  “Look in the mirror again, Doctor. You never had luck with girls like that. Not as a boy and not later. Why do you think you managed to score at the age of forty-two?”

  “I’ve taken her to dinner a few times. I suppose we’ve been seen together. That doesn’t mean we’re having an affair.”

  “If you aren’t having an affair,” Shayne said dryly, “you’re really being taken. You got her the job here, didn’t you?”

  “I happened to know she’s a registered nurse—”

  “And the hospital’s short of nurses. Yeah. Ronnie’s been the question mark this week. She couldn’t find out how he was by asking you, so she had to get in to the bedside. You put her in a cab to the airport tonight. Where did she tell you she was going—back to New York?”

  “I’m not turning that girl over to your tender mercies, Shayne! I know she seems calm and self-possessed, but underneath she’s desperately insecure.”

  “And she’s looking for financial security. I got the same impression.”

  “Please don’t be sarcastic about it. I’ve been spending as much time with her as I’ve been able to manage. I’m aware it can’t last. I’m seventeen years older. I suppose you could call me uncoordinated—some people are, you know. I don’t relate well. But with Dody I’ve been able to—”

  He stopped, and his prominent Adam’s apple rose and fell as he swallowed.

  Shayne said, “How did you get together in the first place?”

  “I suppose she initiated it! I’m not quite senile yet. She pretended to be drunk so I’d drive her home and put her to bed. I came out two days later. I know she was thinking how she could use me to make some money, but do you think I objected? I don’t want Ted Knapp giving me presents, but if a girl like Dody Germaine is willing to come to bed with me in return for an occasional report on the aches and strains of a handful of football players, I’ll be damned if I’ll insult her by telling her to practice her tricks on somebody else. For that matter, if a newspaperman calls me and asks for a bulletin on Aaron Brown’s smashed shoulder, I’ll give him the full rundown. It’s not privileged information. Not that he’s all that important, he’s just a blocker on the punt-return team.”

  “What would you do if she told you to put out false information?”

  “She wouldn’t do that. Then she’d have to admit why she’s sleeping with me… her pretense is that she likes it.”

  “How long do you think it’ll last?”

  Bishop smiled. “If we reach the playoffs, it’ll last into the playoffs. Of course I know it’s temporary. Nothing like it ever happened to me before, and I doubt if it’ll happen again. She’s an incredible girl, Shayne! Incredible.”

  His tongue came out briefly and touched his lips. “Now I suppose you’ll feel you have to pass this on to Zacharias. Well, go ahead. I honestly don’t feel I’ve betrayed the club, but if I have, it’s been worth it.”

  “How’s she betting the game tomorrow?”

  “Don’t you understand? I don’t give a damn about that part of it. I don’t know or care how many points they’re giving in Las Vegas or anywhere else… It’s all the same to me whether the team wins or loses. When I see a fracture or a torn ligament or a pulled hamstring, the only thing I ask myself is how long it’ll take to get that man back into pa
ds. It’s all I concern myself with…”

  “Why do you think they didn’t let you examine Ronnie?”

  Bishop opened his hands. “I think my connection with Dody is becoming known. We haven’t bothered to be careful—I haven’t gone home for the last three weeks! I’m sure my wife must be out of her mind.” He said this with satisfaction. “If you want a theory—”

  “I’ve already heard quite a few,” Shayne said, “but I’ll listen to yours.”

  “I’m theorizing that Joe Truck and Ronnie worked that together. Ronnie couldn’t just fall over and ask to be taken out. He had to be hit. So he arranged for Joe to ease up, and when he saw Joe’s man coming he took a dive. They could win twice with the one move—bet Miami to lose last week and to win tomorrow.”

  “Are you seeing Dody tonight?”

  “Not tonight,” Bishop said with regret. He stood up. “But tomorrow night. And if I continue to be lucky, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night—”

  CHAPTER 14

  Tim Rourke was snoring in the waiting room. Shayne shook him awake and told him again to go home.

  “Not before you tell me which way to bet,” Rourke grumbled. “Here I am on the inside of a hot situation, and I don’t know any more than I did six hours ago. I could have stayed home and flipped a coin.”

  “As far as I can see, it’s still a toss-up,” Shayne said. “New data keeps coming in all the time.”

  “Well, process it, will you?” Rourke said. “Process it, man… You’re slow tonight, for some reason.”

  “Are you still betting with Sol Ambrosiano? If I get a clearer idea, I’ll call in the bet for you. How high do you want to go?”

  “Depending on how you think it looks. Maybe a dime?”

  “One more thing,” Shayne said. “When you wake up in the morning, call six people and tell them Reddick’s autopsy turned up signs that he’d been given a lethal dose of barbiturates twenty minutes before he died. Pick the six people carefully, because I want it to get around.”

  “Is it true or false?”

  “True.”

  “Mike, listen—if somebody was willing to squash Reddick, that means it’s a big operation, so make it fifteen hundred, will you? Two thousand.”

  “Can you pay two thousand if you lose?”

  “I can raise it… Well, don’t bet it if there’s any question about losing!”

  They separated at Shayne’s Buick. Shayne looked up the home phone number of Coach Morty Lynch and gave it to the operator.

  Lynch answered at once. Shayne identified himself and apologized for calling so late.

  “Don’t give it a thought,” the coach said briskly. “I’m on the last year of my contract, and I don’t sleep much Saturday nights. Zacharias told me he was hoping you could start right away. What about the Stitch Reddick thing? Is it under control?”

  Shayne told him that Stitch Reddick, in a sense, was still the major problem, but they had others. “Have you heard from Ronnie?”

  “A couple of hours ago. He did me the honor of calling me. I take it he’s been propped up in a hospital bed watching Bonanza while the rest of us have been working ourselves to the bone getting up for tomorrow.”

  “Something like that,” Shayne said. “If he wakes up in time to make the game, will you use him?”

  “What a warm, likable son of a gun he is, Ronnie. What I’d like to do is hang him from the goalposts by the ears, but there’s a new brand of football being played in this league, Mike… The game has changed, the image has changed, the owners have changed, and you know I’ll use him. But I intend to find out what went on in that hospital room, and I hope I can hit him with a stiff fine and make it stick. The hell of it is, he’ll probably have one of his best afternoons.”

  “You’ll have to scrap your game plan.”

  “And when New York hears about it, they’ll have to scrap theirs. We’ll all be busy tomorrow morning.”

  “Where do you work out your last-minute changes?”

  “In the taping room, why?”

  “Have you ever had it looked at for bugs?”

  There was a moment’s pause, and Lynch said quietly, “Is that a serious question?”

  “Several people have told me they thought Boston and New Orleans were a little clairvoyant.”

  “That’s been known to happen. We try to outguess them, and they try to outguess us. It doesn’t mean they were bugging our—” He breathed, “You know—it could be.”

  “I’ll meet you at the 16th Avenue entrance in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  The phone rang the instant Shayne put it down.

  A voice said, “Shayne—Sol. Sol Ambrosiano.”

  Ambrosiano was one of the town’s most successful bookmakers, in business continuously twenty years without an arrest. He was smart and careful, with friends in both political parties. Shayne’s account with him, never active, had been dormant since Shayne stopped betting on college and professional football. Both men had a wary respect for each other.

  Shayne said, “I didn’t think you liked to talk to people on car phones.”

  “I hate it. It’s against my principles. If I give you a number, will you call me back from a booth?”

  Shayne jotted a Coral Gables number on the inside of a match cover and hung up.

  He decided to let the bookie simmer, and waited until he was only a block from the Orange Bowl before pulling in at an outdoor booth. His phone rang before he left the car. It was Sid Zacharias.

  “Mike,” Zacharias said wearily, “we’re in touch.”

  Shayne’s face wore a slight smile. “I’m surprised you’re still up. If you’re going to be over the reef by daybreak—”

  “I postponed that and came back to town. I’ve just had a blistering call from the commissioner. He knows what happened to his security man. He’s flying down, and we have to work out our strategy before he gets here. I know I gave you carte blanche, more or less, but I wish you hadn’t been chasing Reddick when he went off that bridge.”

  “Is that the way the commissioner got the story?”

  “It’s what happened, isn’t it? Everybody knows Reddick never refused a drink. Somebody got him drunk, and I assume it was you, and then scared him somehow and set up a car chase. A typical Mike Shayne operation—highly successful, highly visible. Possibly I gave you the wrong impression, because this wasn’t what I had in mind… But if you were going to do it this way, why didn’t you let somebody else fish him out of the canal? You can see how it looks to the commissioner.”

  “—that Reddick was getting too close, so you hired a private detective to put him out of action.”

  “Exactly, damn it! In one way the commissioner doesn’t have much power. In another way, he has it all. This is going to be rough, and I’m beginning to wonder if we can ride it out.”

  Shayne’s face had hardened. “I’ll sell you back that hundred shares for forty thousand dollars. That’s one percent of four million, and at this point that’s all the franchise may be worth. Let’s say we talked about a deal but we couldn’t get together, and I decided to go ahead on speculation. I’ll make out better that way—the commissioner may want to hire me to pick up where Reddick left off. And I can name my own price.”

  Zacharias said, “Somebody who didn’t know you might consider that an attempt at blackmail.”

  “Not at all. Any free agent has the right to offer his services to anybody.”

  “You aren’t a free agent quite yet. Perhaps I used the wrong tone a minute ago. There may be—there undoubtedly are—extenuating circumstances. Can I tell the commissioner you had nothing to do with Reddick’s accident?”

  “That wouldn’t be true. I’ll explain when I see you.”

  “How are you situated at the moment? Let me buy you a drink.”

  “I’m about to knock off for the night, Sid,” Shayne said. “I suggest you do the same.”

  “Mike—I’d feel better
if you could give me an interim report. Did you find out what Reddick has been doing?”

  “He’s been trying to milk the situation for money. Tell the commissioner that and see if it shuts him up.”

  “I’ll need some details. I know he’ll hightail it straight in my direction the instant he hits town.”

  “You’d better go back to plan A and go fishing, Sid.”

  “Then he’d know I was ducking him, which would make him madder. I’ve got to have a story to give him. Now if Reddick had evidence of some kind of betting coup, but was holding off doing anything about it so he could get in on it himself—”

  “That would probably be your safest angle.”

  “I’m glad to hear you agree,” Zacharias said. “I’m home, but I can meet you any place you specify.”

  “Not tonight, Sid.”

  “Then let’s make a date for breakfast. Can you come down around nine?”

  “Nothing much can happen before the game,” Shayne said. “I’ll be at the stadium, and maybe we can talk during the half.”

  The owner’s voice rose. “I can’t stall him that long. Now I hear Ronnie’s out of the hospital. We need an explanation for that—on its face, it looks like an out-and-out deception. He was on the serious list yesterday morning, and even an athlete in top physical condition doesn’t recover that fast from a serious head injury.”

  “It not only looks like a deception,” Shayne said firmly, “that’s what it is. We’ll talk about it at the stadium.”

  “What if he slaps a suspension on Ronnie—”

  “He can’t do that without evidence. I’ve been in a couple of fights since I saw you, Sid. One person is dead, and I came close to being the second. I think I could have avoided some of that if you’d leveled with me.”

  “What do you mean I didn’t level with you—”

  “It’s standard. Clients hardly ever tell me the full truth in the first interview. But according to my rules, it means you aren’t entitled to an interim report. Tell the commissioner to forget about suspending anybody if he wants to find out what happened to his boy. When Reddick went into the canal he was doped to the eyebrows as well as full of liquor. We’re looking for somebody we can rap for murder.”